Stockton: a might've been LDS sanctuary

Now that Mitt Romney is back in the race, you might be interested to know San Joaquin County almost beat Salt Lake City to become the Mormon Church's world headquarters.

Michael Fitzgerald

Now that Mitt Romney is back in the race, you might be interested to know San Joaquin County almost beat Salt Lake City to become the Mormon Church's world headquarters.

It's the true - but largely forgotten - story of Sam Brannan and the colony of New Hope. If you can't make a winning bar bet out of this story, fuhgeddaboutit.

From the time Joseph Smith founded The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly called the Mormon Church) in 1830, his followers were persecuted.

Smith himself was jailed for treason in Illinois in 1844. Then he was killed by a mob. New religions never get a warm reception, it seems, especially polygamous ones.

Church leadership passed to Brigham Young. To escape the hostility, Young ordered all Mormons to emigrate from America (which stopped at the Mississippi River), and find their haven somewhere in the West.

It is well known Young led 73 wagons out of Illinois on Feb. 4, 1846. Virtually unknown is that on the same day a ship called the Brooklyn sailed from New York.

Young had ordered Sam Brannan, a Mormon leader in New York, to sail to California, which then belonged to Mexico, and establish a Mormon colony.

Brannan believed his charge was to find the Mormon haven and prepare it for the main host.

The Brooklyn carried 238 Mormon men, women and children, as well as provisions - and by some accounts enough farming equipment for 800 men - 18,000 nautical miles around Cape Horn.

"They were mostly farmers and mechanics from the rural districts, but almost all the trades were represented," Clint McCready wrote in "New Hope: A Mormon Colony in Central California," a 1973 thesis for Brigham Young University.

On July 30, 1846, The Brooklyn landed at what was then called Yerba Buena (population 100-200). That village is now called San Francisco (population a whole lot more).

There, Brannan met explorer John Fremont. Fremont told him the San Joaquin Valley was Eden.

"Two years ago, on my first trip over the Sierras," he said, according to New Hope, "I camped at the confluence of the San Joaquin and Stanislaus Rivers. It was as scenic as Switzerland, balmy as Italy, and fertile as the Nile Delta."

Brannan bought a boat, the Comet, and sailed 20 hearty Mormons from the Bay up the San Joaquin River, to the Stanislaus, and up the Stanny a mile or two.

On the banks, along what is now the county line, Brannan established the Valley's first non-native settlement, New Hope, the new hope for Mormons seeking their place in the sun.

Stockton was a very early California settlement. New Hope beat it by a year.

History records the pioneers set up a saw mill, built several houses and corrals, sowed vegetable gardens and 80 acres of wheat.

Brannan returned to Yerba Buena.

The Valley was as abundant as Fremont had said. The grasslands and waterways teemed with game. Settlers ground their own wheat, used bear oil for lard, and brought wives and children from Yerba Buena.

But there were setbacks. In early winter 1847, rivers flooded the land 8 feet deep. The flood destroyed part of the crops.

Come evenings, wrote one pioneer, "the mosquitoes began to gather in such multitudes that they seemed to threaten a complete extraction of all our blood."

The Mormons began to distrust Brannan, who got sticky fingers around their common funds.

But the real death blow came from Young. Despite Brannan's entreaties, he decided to make the Salt Lake basin the church's headquarters.

Brannan was more than crushed; he thought Young was crazy to choose a barren alkali desert with bad water over the fertile cornucopia of New Hope. He drifted away from the church and made his fortune elsewhere.

Historians disagree why Young rejected San Joaquin. Perhaps he was actually on his way until the Bear Flag Revolt won California for the U.S., the very country Mormons were fleeing.

Whatever the reason, the dejected settlers abandoned New Hope. The last one to leave, Alondus Buckland, settled in Stockton.

Ironically, gold was discovered in California in the spring of '48. That makes New Hope a great might-have-been, said David Stuart, CEO of the San Joaquin Historical Society and Museum.

"I can't help but to think what if they had kept growing for another year," Stuart mused. "When gold was discovered, New Hope might have been the transportation hub for the southern mines, not Stockton. You never know."